By Reality Check group BBC News Image source, Getty Images Tens of thousands of rail employees are taking part in the mostsignificant strike for years. The commercial action by members of the RMT union is over pay and redundancies. The RMT states it desires a pay increase to match the expense of living and hasactually called an deal of 2% – with the possibility of another 1% – “unacceptable”. There haveactually been lots of declares about how much rail employees are paid. Let’s start with the greatest figure estimated. How much are train motorists paid? In a dispute about the strikes in Parliament on 15 June, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps stated: “The mean wage for a train motorist is £59,000, compared with £31,000 for a nurse and £21,000 for a care employee.” To work out the typical income, if you put all train chauffeurs in a row in order of their pay, the individual in the middle of the row would be making the average. Mr Shapps is mainly right on these figures, which come from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). For 2021, the average income for train and cablecar motorists was £59,189 and for nurses it was £31,093. His figure for care employees is a bit high. The typical for care employees and house carers was £16,502 and for senior care employees it was £20,105. The problem with utilizing the figure for train motorists in a dispute about the RMT strikes is that the chauffeurs are represented by their own union, Aslef – which is not taking part in the nationwide strike. Aslef states it represents 96% of train motorists – most of the staying 4% are not union members at all. Aslef motorists are set to strike on Greater Anglia services on 23 June. It is likewise balloting for action on anumberof other lines. Mr Shapps went on to state: “The mean wage for the rail sector is £44,000, which is considerably above the mean income in the nation.” We asked the Department for Transport (DfT) how it got to this figure and
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